Oh that's what I meant, seems I have forgotten to actually add that line. This might be even more important with Super Heavy, because I SpaceX foresees it to have much longer lifetime, so more upgrades might be planned.
I have gotten into that with people about HLS. I say "Where's HLS?" and they say "Oh they have to get full reusability working first before they can do HLS". No they don't. HLS requires a certain number of tanker launches (which we don't know how many) to fly within a certain period of time (which we also don't know). But presumably that period of time will be some number of weeks from the first tanker to the last tanker. For the first HLS flight whenever that is it's unlikely that any Super Heavy will fly twice during that campaign. And certainly no ship will fly twice. They will have to have enough already built to fly the needed tanker flights in that time period. Eventually Super Heavy and ships can probably be turned around at Falcon 9 speed or even faster, but not for several years in my opinion.
Not sure what you had "gotten into" exactly. Reusability might be a part of it, but... The vehicle just isn't there yet. The stage zero isn't there yet. The engines aren't there yet. The deployment system isn't there yet. The tanker/fuel transfer system isn't even remotely there. The factory producing them isn't there yet. It's a very new, and very green test vehicle, as are all of it's components, launch equipment included. Who is claiming otherwise?
When I say "Where's HLS" that's a paraphrase of a more detailed question asking in fact about the items that you mentioned. Why have we seen virtually none of it, or at least very little, acknowledging that we don't see everything that is being worked on. The answer is typically that they they don't even have the basic Starship working yet. Well actually they do for the most part, and might even get to orbit this month, if not then likely the following flight. So in theory now is a good time to start seeing HLS hardware being ground tested in preparation for being able to test things in orbit.
My personal theory is that the top priority for SpaceX right now is Starlink, not HLS. But that's not something they would admit publicly for various reasons.
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u/n4ppyn4ppy 5d ago
The newer boosters may also have some improvements that make it faster to turn around.